The field of computer vision includes topics such as object recognition and image retrieval by similarity. State of the art methodology in these topics has steadily improved with improvements in object/ground segregation. Object/Ground segregation, sometimes referred to generically as “segmentation,” is the problem of segmenting an image into a foreground and background, where the foreground contains an object of interest that belongs to one or more object classes.
Many approaches to segmentation can be characterized as “bottom-up segmentation”. In these approaches, the segmentation is performed using low-level features, such as pixel data.